Monday, November 14, 2005

"We were wrong"

And they weren't just wrong - they lied.

For all the delusional out there, it is time that you let go of your sad delusions. Lay the "Iraq had WMDs" thing to rest. For the sake of sanity. Not only has the Bush administration admitted it, Bush's own advisor - Stephen Hadley - plainly said "We were wrong" just yesterday. Admittedly, he only said that in a vain attempt to gain some credibility before he told some lies, but he still said it.

After telling this truth, however, he added lies. He lied by claiming that the administration didn't lie. And lying to cover up lies is a fairly common practice for liars.

Lie Number 1) The claim that Iraq had attempted to acquire more than 100,000 highstrength aluminum tubes for gas centrifuges to be used for enriching uranium. Highly enriched uranium is one of the two materials that can be used to make nuclear weapons.

The Truth: They were old rocket launchers. They were too short and had the wrong coating to be used as centrifuges.

Lie Number 2) Saddam tried to acquire yellow cake uranium from Niger for the manufacture of nuclear weapons.

The Truth: This claim was based on an obviously forged document. Desperate Bush apologists point out that Bush carefully couched this lie within a disclaimer: 'British Intelligence says..." But it is an uncomfortable fact that before Bush made the claim in his State of the Union Address, George Tenet advised Bush to take out the statement. According to Condi Rice, Tenet told Bush that the claim was not true.

Which means that Bush placed the disclaimer in front of the claim for the purpose of giving himself a loophole while he misled. He knew that there was no credible evidence that Saddam was seeking Uranium from Africa, but he made the claim anyway, and hung it on on the British.

And those are just the first two that occurred to me. There are many others. As Howard Dean said, this is an administration that has a fundamental problem telling the truth.